Lexical imitation and lexical creation in contemporary Romanian

• Main Author: Ana Ene
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Diacronia 2019-11-01
• Series: Diacronia
• Subjects: semantics; sociolinguistics; stylistics
• Online Access: http://www.diacronia.ro/ro/journal/issue/10/A143/en/pdf

The present paper analyses lexical imitation and creation in contemporary Romanian, as two important processes of developing the individual and collective lexis, along with the various forms of borrowing and the internal lexical-grammatical techniques of vocabulary enrichment.Setting the perimeter of the investigation entails: 1) clarifying the two concepts and, due to the complexity of the phenomena and the diversity of occurrences both in the specialised language, in the non-specialized language, as well as in the colloquial and argotic language, a typological approach will follow. The subsequent objective 2) consists in the identification and description of the lexical-semantic mechanisms involved in lexical imitation and creation. Furthermore, as lexical imitation and lexical creation are substantial sources of expressiveness, my endeavour also involves 3) studying their special role in the dynamics of the slang, depending on the degree of communicational complicity determined by such special lexical items.The accomplishment of these objectives requires a chiefly linguistic methodology and the instruments used pertain mainly to the semantic and lexical-paradigmatic patterns of analysis. Given the necessity of considering the context, the discursive parameters and the quantification of the expressiveness of the argotic terms, the present investigation will require instruments of pragma-stylistics and sociolinguistics analysis.